Muriel Rukeyser Archives - Muriel Rukeyser

Elisabeth Däumer, From the Archives: The Four Fears

In the winter of 2023, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein shared with me a drawing by Rukeyser that would be featured on the cover of The Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose, published later that year. The drawing depicts four massive figures surrounded by a wall of red. In the front, dwarfed by the gigantic figures, is a miniature version of Rukeyser herself, clad in a blue dress. In the lower right, if you look closely, you see the penciled words in Rukeyser’s distinctive handwriting, “The Four Fears, March 1955.” Rukeyser, The Four Fears. Drawing. Library of Congress. Shown with permission of the Rukeyser [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-07-02T15:40:33+00:00July 2, 2025|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Lara Meintjes, “this word, this power”: Deixis and Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetics of Witness in The Book of the Dead

The first poem in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead is “The Road.” It describes not “the” road, but rather “these” roads. A plurality of roads knotted and weaving: a suburban road with “junction” and “fork” merges onto a “well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.” The description of this last six-lane conduit mimics the joining of roads and lanes in its stacked hyphenated words. The poet maps her readers away from their own neighborhood and into the broader world of what Rukeyser refers to as “your country,” thus establishing that there exists a world to which the reader belongs [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-01T03:00:06+00:00June 1, 2025|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Louise Kertesz, Review of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s Unfinished Spirit, Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, is itself a work of bold originality and personal, passionate scholarship. It’s fitting that Rukeyser’s work modeled those qualities when critics were dismissing them as inappropriate, even offensive in a woman writer. In her acknowledgments, K-E professes the deep connection she has forged with her subject: “Writing about Rukeyser has helped me think through our political, humanitarian, and environmental crises and to remain, as she models, a ‘vulgar optimist.’”

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-21T20:01:32+00:00July 12, 2023|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Trudi Witonsky, “Lecture by Mr. Eliot”: Some Context

Published 7/20/2022 The Vassar Encyclopedia's entry on Muriel Rukeyser contains part of a poem, originally published anonymously in the November 1933 issue of Con Spirito. Highly critical of T.S. Eliot, "Lecture by Mr. Eliot" was identified as Rukeyser's by Mary McCarthy, musing over the publication in her memoir, How I Grew: "The Scottsboro Boys. Yes, that sounds like Muriel and the reference would be to a reading by Eliot in Avery [Hall] during our senior year, when he gave us one of the early Possum poems" (260). This remembrance might seem like slim evidence, without available confirmation from any of [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:13:49+00:00July 11, 2022|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Rukeyser’s Difficulty–ALA Conference Session, Chicago, Illinois, May 26, 2022

Thursday, May 26, 2022, 4:30--5:50pm, American Literature Association Conference, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois Organized by: Jacqueline Campbell, Princeton University Chair: Vivian Pollak, Washington University “The Promise of the Night-Flowering Worlds,” Trudi Witonsky, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater “‘Not even the bones of what I want to say’: On Muriel Rukeyser and Frances Wickes,” Casey Miller, Eastern Michigan University “Race, Place, and the Politics of Compassion in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Gates’,” Jacqueline Campbell, Princeton University Panel Description For decades, much of Muriel Rukeyser’s writing remained unpublished, unfinished, or lost in the archive. Thanks to the recovery work of scholars such as Rowena [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-22T14:08:32+00:00April 13, 2022|Ruke Blog|0 Comments

“What are all his escapes for?”: Making Sense of Muriel Rukeyser’s Houdini

Dear Reader, In what follows, I have tried to offer a careful reading of Muriel Rukeyser’s 1973 version of Houdini: A Musical, published by Paris Press in 2002. This is the version new audiences will soon encounter together during the four public Houdini events sponsored by the Eastern Michigan University Center for Jewish Studies and the English Department this spring. My goal was to strike at some of the play’s most central questions, to pick up on some of the ambiguities and ideas that might appeal to new and not-so-new readers alike. My own reading grew from the question Marco Bone [...]

Jackie Campbell2025-06-22T13:36:22+00:00March 5, 2022|Ruke Blog|2 Comments

A Conversation about Muriel Rukeyser and Harry Houdini

A conversation between Clinical Psychologist Carolyn Stroebe and Muriel Rukeyser Archive Administrator Elisabeth Daumer on Muriel Rukeyser's interest in Harry Houdini.

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-22T14:01:05+00:00February 20, 2022|Ruke Blog|0 Comments

Susanna Ansorge, Rat Elegy–A Creative Response to Rukeyser’s Elegies

Preface Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies challenges readers with an array of complicated literary devices and historical references as a way of digesting a thoroughly grueling time in world history, as she lived through it. Since the work isn't reflecting on the past, but rather a historical present, Elegies stands as especially relevant for readers experiencing unprecedented times. Even as one of those readers, I still had a lot of difficulty interpreting Rukeyser's ambitious collection. As that's the case, I wanted to emulate her as a way of understanding the work. If I can at least reconstruct how these elegies were written, [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:25:01+00:00January 18, 2022|Essays, Ruke Blog|0 Comments

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